Veil #1

written by Greg Rucka
art by Toni Fejzula

Veil #1 bristles with innuendo, not necessarily cheap, crude, and low-hanging fruit that masquerades as wit or, here, doubles as threat, but pregnant suggestion that piques the reader's curiosity.  It's this curiosity, ours and Veil's, that carries the momentum of the issue.

Veil is mythic, a chimerical echo of gods, heroes and monsters.  It is an occult birth among underground shadows, candles, and an ominous pentangle scrawled on the floor.  She is awakened, red glints in her eyes, by an army of rats, a retinue of beady red-eyed guides to the world above, the subway stairs her gate from the Underworld into the land of the living.  Upon surfacing she finds herself in the guidance of Dante, himself seemingly an allusive mirror of the Italian poet who himself imagined a journey into the realms of the afterlife, led ultimately by his muse Beatrice into Paradise.

She is raw and wide-eyed.  She is a blank slate walking, as though having drunk from the Lethe, but her comprehension comes quickly, if in hitches.  Like a myna bird she imitates, calls back and only sometimes flashes a wry smile of understanding.  And her name, Veil, whether retrieved like a distant memory triggered by the neon sign or merely another mimic, yet another half-comprehended reflection of the world around her, rings of allusive and allegorical potential.  It is the proverbial shroud between the living and the dead, a figurative analogue to the veil of the altar or tabernacle.  "Seven Veils": one of two allusively specific neon signs in her new world's red-light district—the other "Casa Rossa," a nod to Amsterdam's famous club—and a dark reminder of the lethal potential of a beautiful woman, in popular lore the dance of Salome before Herod for the head of John the Baptist.

Fejzula's artwork is sublimely, and a little alarmingly, sensory.  It's gorgeous, no doubt, a delicate, dramatic play of watercolor chiaroscuro, but it's also tactile, auditory, and sometimes olfactory smorgasbord.  As Veil awakens on the floor of the abandoned subway station, it's easy to feel the wind gusting around the oncoming train, the coarse rat whiskers against your fingers, to hear the snuffing of the candle, the scratching of the subway rats across the tiled floor, the squeal of the electric breaks, and to smell the acrid, neon urban tartness that sticks in the fog.